Robert Wilson and the Invasion from Within

by Scott Ruesterholz

  “Yes, Supreme General.” And with that, Tiberius signs off.

  It’s quite clear to everyone in all of these ships as well as to members of the League Council on the Capital Planet of Centurem that Frozos cannot afford to let Earth hold out, as word would spread like wildfire throughout the federation and could inspire mass resistance. At 478 planets, the military is stretched extremely thin. Having added fifty-four planets in just the past year, Frozos’s breakneck pace of expansion has pushed the military to the edge of its policing capacity. Rebellions and food disruptions could quickly snowball into an uncontrollable disaster.

  Beyond the symbolism, Frozos has explained the importance of a friendly ground presence on Earth to patrol the speedway gates and ensure safe loading and passages for transport ships. This is true, but not quite as important as he made it out to be. In reality, Frozos is here to confirm reports and data received from Nick Neverian several years ago that deep beneath Earth’s crust lies an element that mankind has yet to discover.

  The matter is so sensitive that Frozos banned Neverian from speaking of it any further three years ago and has kept the information even from Tiberius, his most trusted advisor. Due to these precautions, Frozos is confident that neither his own political rivals nor Robert Wilson are aware of it. His ship has been conducting deep planetary scans the past two hours, and they confirmed Neverian’s suspicion: Earth is home to a motherlode of the most precious metal in the known universe: raptium. If this is discovered and coordinated with the resistance, Frozos’s very rule could be threatened. But if Earth can be subdued, Frozos can rest, secure in his throne, consolidate power across his expanded League, boost military capacity, and cease his expedition across the vast expanses of the galaxy.

  Earth must fall.

  Chapter 16

  New Mexico

  April 17, 2029

  It has been over two weeks since Planet Earth first learned of the existence of intelligent life when a ship from the League of Planets appeared over the skies of Manhattan. The first five days in the wake of this revelation were defined by the chaos of ever-changing developments. The President of the United States, Nick Neverian, proposed a peace plan, which was blocked in the UN. There were rumors of China invading Russia, only for those to dissipate, and within days, the nations were back at the brink of war. The moon was to be destroyed, but it survived. A force field surrounded the Earth, revealing that the leader of the planet’s greatest company, Robert Wilson, is actually an alien. The leaders of the two most powerful nations, the United States and China, were deposed in a matter of hours. A new pan-global military super force, PEACE, rose like a phoenix from the ashes of fallen governments. And now, a burgeoning space armada is orbiting Earth like a pack of sharks circling an ailing boat, awaiting its capsizing.

  It has been said that history does not move steadily through time; there are certain years where it stops and unfurls a multitude of dramatic events: 33, 1066, 1492, 1776, 1945, to name a few. 2029 is likely to go down as one such year, if there is a history to write. Events that together might amount to one of the most consequential years in human history occurred in rapid succession in the same week; it could be forgiven if most inhabitants would struggle to name every event that they had just experienced. However, everyone on the planet knows that life will never be the same, and that is sufficient enough.

  If the first five days were defined by chaotic birth of a new era, the next ten days have been defined by the gradual return to normalcy, or at least what can be considered normal in this new world. On Sunday April 8, President Victoria Larom, in conjunction with leaders of the Group of 20 (or G-20, the nineteen leading nations and European Union) that it would be the leading priority of global governments to return civil society and the economy to a normal footing. To that end, domestic travel restrictions and curfews were gradually lifted over the course of the next week, though international restrictions were largely kept in place. Alongside this, most regular economic activity was ordered to resume as normal, and key symbolic cultural institutions from professional sporting leagues like Major League Baseball and Premier League Football to concerts and Broadway theatrical performances returned to normal schedules.

  On Tuesday, April 10, world financial markets and banks reopened after a one week holiday. There was grave concern that the events of the past week could cause mass panic and a death spiral in financial markets that could shatter fragile nerves and confidence. Needless to say, in the financial halls of power from Shanghai to London, Frankfurt, and New York, there was quite significant pressure from governmental and regulatory bodies on major banks, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, and asset managers to limit selling and do their patriotic duty. Of course, on Monday, the world’s major central banks, led by the Federal Reserve announced coordinated policy actions to support the global economy, including lowering interest rates and promising to inject a combined $16 trillion in liquidity, which buoyed investor sentiment heading into Tuesday’s market open. In an emergency press conference on Monday, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve put it thusly: “Our government has gone on a wartime footing against an alien enemy to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today, I can assure the American people and the people of all nations that the world’s central banks are similarly assuming a war footing, using all of our tools to insulate this economy from attack.”

  Perhaps, no one is more nervous on that Tuesday morning ahead of the 9:30 AM stock market open than Chris Bailey, now co-CEO of Arbor Ridge. On Monday, the company’s entire workforce showed up for work, a fact that he and co-CEO Mark Morrison are rather proud of. Alongside PEACE, government policy, and central banks, Chris and Mark had been putting Arbor Ridge on a wartime footing as well over the weekend, increasing shifts at its food and beverage plants, expecting a run on goods at grocery stores, prepping increased investment plans in the utility and communications division to harden the grid, and of course, ramping up activity at its manufacturing facilities that would be supplying PEACE with products. By getting this company operating at full capacity, they knew that would facilitate a return to normalcy throughout the global economy—the company is just that big. By announcing they would not lay off any employees, they put pressure on other companies to follow suit, and dozens have.

  Coming into Tuesday, Arbor Ridge is worth about $12 trillion, meaning its shares account for about 17 percent of the value of the U.S. stock market. How would its shares respond to news that its leading founder is an alien? Not only that, but he had to leave the company to run PEACE. On top of all that, the Project Ridley assets had been valued at $600 billion, but a 50 percent stake in them had been sold for $150 billion, meaning the company would be writing down the value of its assets by $300 billion. Chris is prepared to see the stock plunge. Indeed at the open, shares were down 9.7 percent (or nearly $1.2 trillion), but they began to bounce mid-morning on news that ordinary investors are buying stocks. There are reports that dinner reservation activities, hotel bookings, and online shopping are running at or above the normal pace.

  By the day’s close, Arbor Ridge shares are down less than 2 percent, and the stock market less than 1 percent, which is hailed as a tremendous victory. The much-feared chaos did not materialize. Instead, in their own small way, billions of people showed they would not be cowed into submission by Frozos’s bullying, instead choosing to try to continue with ordinary life, attempting to “keep calm and carry on” as they had during past conflicts.

  From that day forward, the fears of social unrest, economic collapse, or rolling government lockdown policies faded away. Commuter trains filled up; offices went back to work. There were, of course, some signs of underlying stress, from elevated toilet paper sales to increased attendance of church services, but the contingency plans that governments across the globe had formed have proved unnecessary for now. Would this last or would a breach of the force field shatter this calm? No one quite knew. But for the time b
eing, the steely calmness of ordinary men and women everywhere flew upwards to their elected and unelected leaders who realized they had underestimated the guts and grit of the people they lead.

  The relative normality of civil society is of great relief to Robert Wilson, though he had hoped for as much, allowing him to spend his days focused entirely on PEACE’s mission: ramping up production of the SF-01, rounding out recruitment of pilots, and introducing himself via a series of video conferences with the assigned nonvoting military representative of each participating nation. He doesn’t need their support to do anything during these six months, but it would make his life easier and bolster the legitimacy of his actions, or so he feels, if his major decisions are backed by the majority of the participants.

  Ten days have passed now since PEACE was officially formed, and new plants are progressing as expected. They should be producing the hoped-for 4,750 planes per week in three weeks’ time. Hitting the target of 50,000 planes will still be ambitious, but things are going successfully enough that this “reach” goal does continue to seem attainable.

  On this Tuesday morning, Robert is walking off a plane at a joint Air Force-PEACE base and training facility in the New Mexico desert. It is 10:00 AM local time and an unusually warm eighty-two degrees, though temperatures are set to drop below fifty degrees tonight. Robert is wearing a green button-down shirt and khaki pants, a business casual look that has become his go-to as the Commander of PEACE, as he walks across the tarmac. He’s introduced to Major Alan Thompson of the Air Force on the way to the main building, the highest ranking official on the base and its official liaison to PEACE. Thompson is a stern man in his mid-fifties, proud that his base will be home to such a critical war effort but also wary of having non-Air Force personnel roaming its grounds.

  Major Thompson leads Robert into the main facility, and off in the distance, Robert sees the sun reflecting off over 200 SF-01s, made in the Los Angeles Project Ridley basement. This giant hanger has been converted from housing planes to dozens of simulators. Here, over 700 recruits are training in their assigned squadrons.

  The simulators are essentially enhanced versions of the Galactic Flyer: Invasion virtual reality video game. The SF-01 control panel is already identical to that of the flyer in the game. In these simulations however, all of the individual simulators are linked into one game, so that each member of a squadron is working alongside fellow members of a squadron. Additionally, the game’s developers have been intensely updating levels and war games based on incoming data from the ships above Earth, as well as the likeliest battles, either attempting to exit the Earth’s atmosphere to fight out in space or a simulation where the force field has fallen and they are defending Earth’s major cities in low-altitude skirmishes.

  A key element that PEACE recruiters screened on in gameplay data was a player’s willingness when fighting within a squadron to sacrifice one’s plane and life if that would enable other flyers to advance. It is a harsh reality of war that not everyone will come home. However, it’s one thing to make a calculated sacrifice in a video game and another in real life. The most pressing question of this entire endeavor is whether pilots could put aside the natural instinct of self-preservation and sacrifice themselves or go for the riskier route that offers an attractive risk/reward.

  These simulations are intended to hash that out and weed out those pilots who play the game well but can’t translate that into real-life success. Indeed, a key aspect of these hours of games is for each pilot to “die” at least once, and then to measure whether their strategy changes in future rounds as the realization they may not come home sinks in. Several dozen recruits across the program just in the past twenty-four hours have been removed from the talent pool because they become overly conservative, to the detriment of the mission’s success, after suffering a fatal attack in previous simulations.

  Robert is convinced to his core that civilians can be just as heroic as those in the military—after all, members of the military are all former civilians. It is due to this belief that he has largely raised a civilian army. However, he appreciates that those in the military have—prior to the offer from PEACE—already signaled a willingness to die for a cause and been trained to act rationally and for the good of the mission when under duress. Therefore, in every squadron of twenty-four planes, they have attempted to have at least three members of the military in a hope that their training could prove contagious to the broader group.

  Additionally, as experienced by China, Robert has already developed a talent pool of 1,200 pilots. To help train and motivate these new recruits, Robert has sprinkled around many of these pilots to the new PEACE bases to lead in simulations and offer advice about taking the game play to the battlefield.

  At this base, Anna Small, one of the Arbor Ridge “interns” along with the squadron she directly leads in her role as a group commander, is here to speed up the recruits’ training. The recruits at this base who pass through the training will fold into Anna Small’s group. It is accordingly valuable for her to have some face-to-face interaction and develop a sense of trust and comradery with them.

  Anna is a red-blooded Midwestern American. She was born and raised in Missouri with a father who was a shift supervisor at the nearby auto plant and a mother who was the school nurse at her town’s middle school. At twenty-two, she is the second-oldest of four children and the only girl, and she took a gap year from her senior year at Washington University in St. Louis to accept the Arbor Ridge internship, which admittedly has not been what she expected.

  She led the third highest scoring squadron in the Galactic Flyer competition, and her training results over the past six months have been extremely strong. She has a bold flying style, preferring to take riskier routes and press the advantage in battle to capitalize on momentum and distress in the opponents. The recruits at this base have exhibited a similar style, which should allow for a cohesive group formation.

  She is standing in the front of the hanger, watching on the screen the battle simulation play out. In this game, the fighters are trying to protect the West Coast of the United States from an invasion of one transport destroyer and the dozens of small crafts whom escort it. She has been alternating between participating in simulations and observing to see how the recruits fly and what common mistakes are made. This is the second time they are running this simulation. The first was a disaster with pilots acting as individuals rather than as a group, and the coastal cities were destroyed inside forty-five minutes. This round has been a more even fight, though Anna is keenly aware that even is not good enough when the future of humanity is on the line.

  Major Thompson leads Robert to her. She, like all the PEACE soldiers, is wearing the red jumpsuit to differentiate them from Air Force personnel. Recruits wear a bright yellow band on their left sleeve to signal they have not yet passed training and are effectively on a trial period.

  “Group Commander Small, I believe you’ve met Commander Wilson,” Major Thompson says.

  “Yes, I have, though not as Commander,” Anna responds as she shakes his hand.

  “Well, I’m the same guy. Tell me, how are the recruits doing?” Robert asks.

  “They are working hard. It’s a steep learning curve, but most are showing progress.”

  “That’s good. Now be honest, do you think many are scared?”

  “Everyone is. But most are as scared of failure as of dying.”

  “Well, I guess that’s good?” Robert asks.

  “That depends,” Thompson interjects. He’s not a member of PEACE, but as this is his base and he has been training pilots for over two decades, he’s entitled to speak. “Fear of dying can cause excess conservatism. But fear of failure can cause a pilot to tense up and miss his shot, similar to a hitter choking in the bottom of the ninth.”

  “Thanks for your perspective, Major. Which of the two fears do you prefer in a new recruit?” Robert asks, sincerely
curious to hear his response.

  “Fear of failure, no doubt, because that’s easier to train away. Success will breed success.”

  “I know, and that’s the challenge of this entire operation. There won’t be many battles, and losing the first one could be the end. It’s hard to have early success that breeds other ones.”

  The three ponder over that while watching the battle simulation play out on the screen. There is no simple answer apparent to any of them about how to address that concern. One or two minutes later, an aide in a purple jumpsuit signaling a role in communications, rushes over to Robert.

  “Thornhill needs to speak to you, sir,” he says with a strong sense of urgency.

  “Very well. Major Thompson, where is the secure PEACE communications facility at this base?”

  “It’s in the basement level underneath our main office complex. I can take you there.”

  “Thank you, Major. Group Commander Small, you’re free to join us; I think this may be of interest to you.”

  “Thank you, I will.”

  Together, they walk out past the rows of training recruits and across the tarmac to a brick office building and into its basement. Robert can’t help but think to himself how ironic it is that he is spending almost all of his time below ground when the threat is far above it. This communications room is a small, soundproof room of ten by twelve feet with a simple wooden table surrounded by folding chairs. Thompson is not permitted in the room, so just Robert, Anna, and a communications aide walk in. There are already three communications workers who are stationed here full-time, in the event there is an order from headquarters to deploy the pilots. Robert acknowledges them and sits at the center of the table across from a large, closed circuit television with a direct feed to Jake Thornhill’s command center in Jersey City.